Oct 21, 2011

"Shake up your thinking by looking at the world from the perspective of a
particular country, industry, or company. “Rooted” maps can help you unearth
hidden opportunities and threats.
Senior executives need better mental maps to navigate our unevenly globalized
world. Although a wide variety of metrics show that just 10 to 25 percent of
economic activity is truly global, executives disproportionately embrace visions
of unbounded opportunities in a borderless world, where distances and
differences no longer matter."

"Executives can go a step further in understanding their own companies’ sensitivity to distances by creating internal rooted maps that show how assets or management are deployed and by overlaying those maps with rooted external ones."

"By using rooted maps, senior executives can make their perceptions of the business environment more accurate. As they remap their mind-sets, they should boost the odds of making good decisions that lead to strong business results."

Pankaj Ghemawat in this article writes about globalization and the usefulness of CAGE framework (cultural, administrative, geographical, and economic distances) rooted maps in a strategy and give some tips in how to use them.
After reading the article I felt a BULL sensation coming up in my mind. What is the novelty in this?

And I was not the only one with the same opinion:

«I value models that help us see things differently, and a tool doesn’t
have to generate insight every time for it to have value. These maps
express information that we have already in some form, i.e., that we
might think we already “know.” I’m not sure that what’s presented in the
piece turn the facts into new insights for me, but the visual
presentation can still have a useful impact.»

«This is much to do about nothing. The idea that distance, demographics,
languages, localization, and centers of excellence plays a critical role
in business is not news.»

«These sort of maps are called cartograms, and the technique for the maps
shown here uses a density-equalizing algorithm created by Gastner and
Newman, which should be mentioned because this is something that
cartographers have worked on for decades, if not centuries. It is great
to see cartograms being used more widely, but it is a bit basic and
quite misleading to use a term like “rooted” maps.»